Flutterby™! : Stable pseudonyms more civil than "real" user names

Online anonymity: study found ‘stable pseudonyms’ created a more civil environment than real user names. Drawing from comments on various phases of Huffington Post:

Our results suggest that the quality of comments was highest in the middle phase. There was a great improvement after the shift from easy or disposable anonymity to what we call “durable pseudonyms”. But instead of improving further after the shift to the real-name phase, the quality of comments actually got worse – not as bad as in the first phase, but still worse by our measure.